Ebook: Introduction to geometric computing

The geometric ideas in computer science, mathematics, engineering, and physics have considerable overlap and students in each of these disciplines will eventually encounter geometric computing problems. The topic is traditionally taught in mathematics departments via geometry courses, and in computer science through computer graphics modules. This text isolates the fundamental topics affecting these disciplines and lies at the intersection of classical geometry and modern computing.

The main theme of the book is the definition of coordinate-free geometric software layers for Euclidean, spherical, projective, and oriented-projective geometries. Results are derived from elementary linear algebra and many classical computer graphics problems (including the graphics pipeline) are recast in this new language. Also included is a novel treatment of classical geometric and solid modeling problems. The definition of geometric software layers promotes reuse, speeds up debugging, and prepares the ground for a thorough discussion of advanced topics.

Start-up programs are provided for many programming exercises making this an invaluable book for computer science lecturers as well as software developers and researchers in the computer graphics industry.

Although geometry has been a flourishing discipline for millennia, most of it has seen either no practical applications or only esoteric ones. Computing is quickly making much of geometry intriguing not only for philosophers and mathematicians, but also for scientists and engineers. What is the core set of topics that a practitioner needs to study before embarking on the design and implementation of a geometric system in a specialized discipline? This book attempts to find the answer.

Every programmer tackling a geometric computing problem encounters design decisions that need to be solved. What may not be clear to individual programmers is that these design decisions have already been contemplated by others who have gone down some system design path only to discover (usually much later) that the design decisions that were made were lacking in some respect. This book reviews the geometric theory then applies it in an attempt to find that elusive “right” design.